Sure, Star Citizen already has caves, and they’re generally pretty nice caves, but what if they could be better? That’s the goal for a refinement and update pass coming to caves arriving in alpha 3.18, which was previewed in the first half of this week’s Inside Star Citizen video.
In general, caves will be easier for the devs to create thanks to tools that do the vast majority of the creation work without needing members of the art team. Caves themselves will also feel better to explore, with less bumpy ground to stop camera jarring. On top of that, there will be more caves added to multiple planets, though there will not be any missions to be found within them in the feature’s first release.
The second half of the video offers a broad look at initial work on a new player experience being concepted by CIG. This tutorial adds opt-in prompts that guide players through interactions in the hab, direct them to the first store, and instruct them on how to fire up their spaceship and leave dock. There will even be some “very light missions” that ease new players into space combat and FPS combat. This new tutorial function is still in its early stages, but interested players can check out where things stand in the video below.
